My thoughts and experiences about software development

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3 ideas to energize your stand up

I already described how using Walk the Board made our stand ups more efficient, here a few more ideas to make them even better.

Have team members take turns to facilitate

To increase the team’s ownership of the stand up (you’re supposed to be doing them as a way to help the team), having team members take turn in facilitating the meeting is a great idea.

Your role when facilitating is to make sure that this meeting brings as much value to the team as possible. It’s good exercise for each team member to reflect upon what that means.

It also livens things up a bit because everyone has different tempo when facilitating.

Furthermore it minimizes the risk that team doesn’t do the stand up when the Scrum Master is away because .

Work with WIP limits

To promote collaboration further and put even more focus on finish things rather than starting new ones, Work In Progress limit (WIP limit) is a great tool.

When there is no more room on the board because we hit a limit, we need to start helping the others out to finish a task or story before starting something new.

Agree on a code word for interrupting discussions

A common problem during stand ups is when a couple of members get involved in a long discussion about for example, design.

One tip to solve this is to agree on a code word to use to cut that discussion short without anyone getting offended. They are welcome to resume the conversation when the stand up is over.

I’ve heard people use SUMO (Shut Up and Move On) and in my team we say “time is like a tree” since we have this motivational poster on our board.

And then…

There are plenty of more ideas to use to improve your stand ups. I’ve heard of drawing a circle on the floor to get team members to stand closer together and other interesting ideas. Dare to explore and don’t just stick with the same formula forever!